COVID-19 exposes sector’s vulnerability

While protecting human health and public safety is the primary concern of authorities in Australia and all over the world in dealing with COVID-19 (coronavirus), it has exposed how reliant the Australian tertiary education sector has become on international student income. At the time of writing (28 February), Universities Australia estimated that up to 100,000 Chinese students were unable to come to Australia to begin the 2020 academic year, with no indication of when the Morrison Government’s travel ban (a week-by-week proposition) will be lifted. If the ban continues for any significant time, Australian universities could potentially suffer a multi-billion hit to revenue this year. The Group of Eight (Go8) universities have the most Chinese students enrolled, and are therefore the most exposed. Fortunately they tend to be the most wealthy universities, and are generally in a better position to weather such a crisis. Monash University has delayed the start of the first semester by four weeks and the University of Sydney has extended enrolments until 31 March. But it isn’t only Go8 universities that are affected – the University of Canberra has invited international students who cannot get to Australia to defer their studies for first semester, while the University of Newcastle is one of several universities committed to offering students their courses online (notwithstanding the incredible difficulties of having to deal with China’s heavily restricted internet access). This has serious implications for the workloads of both academic staff in preparing courses, and professional staff in administering courses and enrolments in particular.

Casual staff adversely affected The implications for casual academic staff are even more horrendous, with the prospect of little to no work if the travel ban continues and there simply aren’t any classes to teach. NTEU has delayed a scheduled increase to our casual membership fees to relieve members suffering loss of income (see p. 50). The Union is currently considering further financial relief options. We are seeking a commitment from universities that casual staff will not suffer reduced income in the event of deferred semesters, cut shifts and closed campuses. NTEU National President Alison Barnes said 'We’ve written to Vice-Chancellors asking them to agree that those casual staff who would normally be working from day one of semester will not be worse off as a result of timetable changes due to coronavirus... Many of our casual academic members have not had work since well before Christmas. The prospect of cut shifts due to disrupted teaching timetables will mean they can’t pay their bills and put food on the table.' Many workers in both the public and private tertiary education sectors are having to deal with the potential of lost work and income without a real safety net. The Union has also urged universities to properly support those staff, both academic and professional, who have been directed to move teaching to 'online only' delivery in the event that in-person teaching on campus is suspended or deferred.

Public funding cuts The reliance on international student income by the public tertiary education sector has been largely driven by longterm cuts to government funding, with more than $7 billion worth of cuts to university funding over the last decade, and billions more taken out of the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. In research published in the latest issue of the NTEU's academic refereed journal, Australian Universities’ Review ('What will follow the international student boom?' AUR, vol. 62, no.1, 2020, pp. 18-25), RMIT University's Angel Calderon details the dramatic changes in the mix of domestic and international students and the consequent revenue streams:

'The number of student enrolments in Australian higher education has increased from 441,074 in 1989 to 1.56 million in 2018. Over this period, domestic student enrolments have seen an annual average growth of 3.4% compared to 11.9% for international students…